How Does a Mega Cruise Ship Source, Store, and Prepare All That Food?

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The Condé Nast Traveler Explainer explains how mega cruise ships parlay hundreds of pallets of food into thousands of high-quality meals a night.

Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas' main dining room, Adiago.

Imagine you supervise the culinary logistics of a mega-cruise ship. Say it's Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas, which feeds up to 5,400 passengers multiple times a day at 26 venues, ranging from a Starbucks to upscale eatery Chef's Table. Picture yourself overseeing portside food inspectors, shipboard bread bakers, and 1,200 other workers dedicated to passengers' gastronomic wishes.

It's a mind-bending job, right? The mere thought of it might make an ordinary mortal want to go on a carbo-loading, comfort-food binge to cope. Yet as many cruise lines supersize their ships, they must also scale up their provisioning operations to the same deftness as would be required to supply a battleship during wartime.

So we checked in with the major cruise lines for the 411 on what happens behind the scenes on a romantic Caribbean jaunt. Here's what we dug up:

"Every voyage, it’s show time, like Broadway," says Cyrus Marfatia, vice president of culinary and dining for Carnival Cruise Lines and the man who directs the company's ongoing production, so to speak. On the 2,974-passenger Carnival Freedom, for instance, it takes 150 workers in kitchens to parlay 240 pallets' worth of food into thousands of meals worthy of fine restaurants.

Cunard spokesperson Jackie Chase makes a similar point by using the famous liner Queen Mary 2 as an example. She describes the management of the vessel's typical "turnaround day" in port as comparable to "checking out the entire Plaza Hotel in New York after breakfast, having the entire kitchen re-stocked during the morning (with up to 20 trucks offloading goods at the hotel), changing every bed linen and towel, checking in the entire hotel during the afternoon, and holding a state banquet in the evening." In real life, no hotel does anything close to what cruise lines like Cunard do week in and week out.

Rack of lamb, Queens Grill on the Queen Mary 2

Predicting passenger tastes is the first challenge. Companies analyze guests' dining patterns to suss out trends and plan menus. Trends can vary by season, route, and type of passenger. Case in point: When Europeans outnumber Americans on a Cunard ship, lighter wines such as Riesling and pinot noir are ordered more often than bolder varietals, such as Shiraz and Chardonnay, which tend to be favored by many of us Yanks.

The next hurdle is to transfer supplies from pier to ship. Exhibit A: Disney's 2,700-passenger Magic loads up 3,125 gallons of soda, 10,000 pounds of chicken, and 71,500 eggs for an average weeklong sailing. (Holy Bieber, that's a lot of grub!)

The saga starts before dawn, when workers meet quayside to inspect pallets of food for quality, such as checking produce for freshness. Time is of the essence, says Frank Weber, vice president for food and beverage operations for Royal Caribbean. "We start loading around 7 a.m. in the morning, so we have until 3:30 p.m. to send something back to our produce supplier, like a pallet of tomatoes, and to get a replacement a little later in the afternoon."

Longshoremen then load supplies into the hull. In the case of Royal Caribbean, the food is typically transferred from wooden pallets to metal trays, which can be more easily cleaned, to prevent ship contamination by anything that might have been on the wood. For similar reasons, other packaging, such as cardboard, is incinerated.

Once on the ship, supplies are shuttled to dozens of storehouses set to various temperatures. On Cunard's QM2, a storeroom for ice cream is set at minus-0.4 degrees Fahrenheit, while a separate room holds meat at a more appropriate temperature.

Storage, preparation, and cooking are done in separate rooms to prevent cross-contamination. For instance, commissary kitchens customarily handle food preparation, such as slicing tomatoes, cubing melons, and marinating slices of beef. That way, no prep work happens in the kitchen.

Technology assures smooth sailing by alerting crewmembers to how many passengers are grabbing a bite. Royal Caribbean, for instance, has head-counting cameras in the ceilings of its main dining areas that tally when and where passengers gravitate, providing data that can be used to anticipate peak serving times.

Ships keep menus simple (for instance, offering a single main version each of meat, poultry, and seafood) to enable their cooks to prepare food to order and serve it at the proper temperatures. (Of course, some ships have a few specialist venues onboard that provide more varied menus, but they serve a small, subset of passengers and are the exception to the general rule.)

Simplified menus allow chefs to synchronize meal creation with the needs of diners. "We don't pre-cook the steaks and keep them in a warmer as you would in a typical hotel banquet operation," says Weber of Royal Caribbean, describing a method that's common to better cruise lines. "And we don't plate food until the waiter is on the path to deliver it."

Stockpiling enough reserve supplies for a surprise spike in demand is also standard practice. Storerooms typically house a day or two's extra provisions, ensuring that plenty of spare ingredients will be on hand. During hurricane season, ships store even heftier hoards of culinary supplies. Banking extra supplies is also the norm for ships on routes that spend less time than usual in port.

Occasionally, there are rare circumstances when kitchens do, in fact, run out of individual random ingredients, such as wasabi. When that happens, as soon as a ship berths at a port, crewmembers race down the gangway and hit the local markets to source what's missing.